Human Polygraph Exposes Criminals

February 5, 1987|Chicago Tribune

The Mississippi Highway Patrol hunted almost a year for Stacie Pannell`s killer. The person who murdered the 18-year-old freshman in her dormitory room at Northeast Mississippi Junior College in Booneville apparently crawled through an open window and caved in the coed`s skull with the butt of a drill- team rifle.

It was grisly stuff, probably the most notorious crime in the northern half of the state. People talked about it a lot. Certainly, the cops talked. They questioned dozens of people and narrowed the case down to two suspects. The first was a man with a history of sex offenses. The other was Pannell`s boyfriend. He believed she had been unfaithful to him on her trips home from college. He was jealous and angry; he had a motive. Moreover, he failed the lie-detector test when asked if he`d ever thought about killing her.

Still, the highway patrol`s detectives didn`t have enough evidence to charge anyone. That`s why they summoned Steve Rhoads, the police chief of the tiny Chicago suburb of East Hazel Crest (population 1,362), 600 miles to the north. One of the Mississippi investigators had heard Rhoads lecture about a special interrogation technique at a Drug Enforcement Administration seminar. The man knew how to get at the truth.

When Rhoads met Stephanie Alexander, he had already ruled out the sex offender as a suspect and was waiting to talk to Pannell`s boyfriend. According to what the investigators told him, Alexander, 21, figured into the case only tangentially. A suite mate of Pannell`s, she wasn`t a suspect, but police thought she knew something she wasn`t telling.

Rhoads said he asked Alexander a series of simple questions: What was her name, her address, her telephone number, her date of birth, her place of birth, her Social Security number? As she answered, Rhoads carefully watched her eyes. With each response they twitched to the left.

Finally, he said, he asked her to speculate about how Pannell might have been killed. Her eyes went to the right.

``She said she didn`t know,`` Rhoads recalled.

``Who do you think had an opportunity to kill Stacie?`` Rhoads wondered next.

Again, she said she didn`t know, Rhoads said. But her eyes moved right once more.

``What do you suppose their motive was?``

Same response.

Her eyes had moved right a third time, and inside Rhoads` head, an alarm sounded. His questions grew more specific. Painstakingly, he said, he sought her whereabouts on the night of the crime.

``You said you were asleep at the time of the attack. What time did you go to sleep?``

Alexander`s eyes darted right and before she could answer the question, Rhoads stopped her. ``Don`t tell me that, Stephanie. It`s not true.``

``You said you took a shower,`` Rhoads continued, ``why?``

Once more, Alexander`s eyes twitched right.

``Damn it, Stephanie,`` Rhoads said impatiently, not letting the young woman get a word out, ``you`re making that up. I want the truth.``

And so it went for the next two hours. Each time Alexander`s eyes moved right, Rhoads recounted, he cut her off, admonishing her before she spoke. Each time her eyes moved left, he let her talk, encouraged her, even. Little by little, Rhoads said, as three astonished highway patrolmen looked on, Alexander admitted to the murder of Stacie Pannell.

At last, the flustered young woman looked at Rhoads.

``You can read my mind, can`t you?`` he remembers her asking.

``Yes,`` the cop said simply, ``I can.``

Actually, what Rhoads reads is a kind of involuntary body language. ``Eyes move in patterns,`` he says, seated in a small, sparsely furnished office at the East Hazel Crest Police Department. ``They move differently when you`re remembering and when you`re creating. And if you`re creating when you`re talking to me about a crime, you`re lying.``

That`s the short of it. The long of it is an elaborate system of evaluation that involves right- and left-brain dominance, sound, sight or feeling orientation, positive and negative anchoring, posture, intonation and a unique application of a 50-cent piece of psychological nomenclature -- Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

Rhoads, 32, learned about Neuro-Linguistic Programming eight years ago while studying for a bachelor`s degree in behaviorial science at the University of Southern Colorado. It was a relatively new idea then, having been developed only a few years before by Richard Bandler, a mathematician and computer expert, and John Grinder, a linguistics professor in California.

The concept, used initially to establish rapport between patients and practitioners in psychotherapy, held that everybody sees the world through a dominant sense -- sight, sound or feeling. ``If you`re sight-oriented, you want to see lightning,`` Rhoads explains in an oversimplified example. ``If you`re sound-oriented, you want to hear thunder.``